The present invention relates to a machine for receiving and stacking blanks of cardboard or like material, of variable shape and format, successively cut out from a continuous web, by a cutting-out apparatus located upstream of the machine, supplied in "scales" on a conveyor, overlapping one another.
Various machines are known at the present time for receiving blanks of cardboard which are cut out from a continuous web of cardboard by a rotating or flat cutting out apparatus located upstream. These cardboard blanks, on which lines of fold have also been marked, are intended subsequently to constitute packings for various products.
A stacking process is also known, employed in the newspaper industry, which consists in returning on itself, through 180.degree., a continuous line of successive newspapers overlapping one another, to stack them in the upper part of the machine for receiving the newspapers. In this process, the newspapers engage successively at the base of the stack of newspapers previously formed. Consequently, the stack is developed continuously from its base. Such a process, applied to the staacking of exercise books, i.e. of sheets folded on themselves and superposed, is also described in British Pat. No. 2.034285. Such a process, although it is suitable for newspapers or sheets of booklets folded on themselves, of regular rectangular format, cannot be employed as such for stacking blanks of cardboard cut out in short series from blanks having irregular profiles and a variable format from one series to the other.
The present invention aims at adapting this process of stacking in a machine making it possible, depending on the number of blanks of a particular number of copies, i.e. depending on whether it is a question of receiving successive blanks forming part of a series of a large number or of a small number of blanks, either automatically to form and evacuate stacks of a predetermined number of blanks, in order to facilitate subsequent take-up of the piles of blanks, as a function of their use downstream, or to allow the blanks to leave continuously one after the other, to allow easy manual take-up of the blanks.